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Among the important fall film festivals, TIFF is not like the others when it comes to using a distinctive poster to promote itself.

New York has shapely gams and a stairway to heaven.

Venice has flying fish and French New Wave memories.

Telluride celebrates film history with a collage of celluloid.

Toronto has, er, what exactly?

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An eye-catching poster is one of the tools film festivals use to attract attention and mark each yearly event. Most of them take pains to choose artists with bold ideas. Selected designs are announced with fanfare.

The Toronto International Film Festival takes a different approach. It opts not to use a single poster image, preferring to employ multiple ones. In recent years, these have been a series of streetscapes and audience scenes.

They’ve also been extremely dull. Many of the images TIFF uses could be repurposed by the City of Toronto or the TTC to promote tourism or transit, and nobody would be the wiser.

The nearest thing TIFF has for identifiable poster art is the picture used for the cover of its printed film program book. The 2014 cover has a blurry black-and-white photo of the corner of King and John Sts., where festival headquarters TIFF Bell Lightbox stands. At least it’s an improvement on the 2013 cover, which had a bland and blurry photo of a TTC streetcar passing the Lightbox.

The festival used to have a strong poster image, one that it would proudly unveil each year in May at its annual cocktail party in Cannes — and the Cannes Film Festival is known for having striking and collectible posters.

TIFF’s past poster choices have even been known to make headlines. In 1991, it cheekily and controversially displayed three naked tushes (two female and one male) above the heading, “Not Just For Film Buffs.” Some outraged Torontonians accused the organization, then known as the Festival of Festivals, of promoting porn. But the poster survived the storm, attracting lots of attention to a still-young festival.

Around about the time TIFF moved into its new Bell Lightbox HQ in 2010, it ceased trying to make a single defining visual statement, apart from its ubiquitous “tiff.” brand name that it stamps everywhere, usually in bright orange.

“I think we’ve just evolved, or how we’ve done it has evolved, over the years,” says Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director.

“We used to have a single image and I think what we found is that it was working well with a certain target audience. But as we’ve tried to expand the festival and reach new audiences, we wanted to have a number of different images.”

A laudable and inclusive idea, yet it seems to me TIFF is missing a trick by failing to stamp a visual imprint on its biggest show of the year.

Especially this year, when the festival has taken pains to assert itself on the festival battlefield by insisting that any film shown during the first four days must be either a world or North American premiere.

A look at what other major festivals are doing with their posters this fall gives an idea of what TIFF is missing out on.

The New York Film Festival (Sept. 26 to Oct. 12) has the whimsical image of a pair of shapely legs in white stockings, standing beneath a white staircase that ascends into the heavens. It’s the work of artist and filmmaker Laurie Simmons, mother of Girls star Lena Dunham, who is known and celebrated for her “living objects” motif of animating dollhouse figures.

An NYFF news release notes that each year’s poster is the “signature” for the festival. Previous designs have included works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman.

The NYFF poster often pops up in usual places. An episode of Mad Men recently had the Saul Bass 1964 festival poster on display.

The Venice Film Festival (Aug. 27 to Sept. 6) is really mixing its metaphors with this year’s poster design. Designed by Studio Graph.X in Milan, based on Simone Massi’s drawings, it shows boy rebel Antoine Doinel, the main character in François Truffaut’s 1959 debut masterpiece The 400 Blows, played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud.

He’s standing before a water scene of flying fish, “an element of fantasy that mitigates the quizzical dimension of his gaze, as he prepares to plunge into the sea of life,” a festival news release says.

He celebrates the analog history of film in the digital age with a wild and colourful array of celluloid strips, numbers and letters. The image is meant to connote film’s past, Marclay says, and also “to show how cinema is an art of collage — fragments are collected and assembled to tell a story.”

All these posters are distinctive, beautiful and potentially lucrative. They can be transferred to T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse mats and other souvenirs to earn badly needed revenue for their festivals.

The Sundance Film Festival is so proud of its posters, for its 30th anniversary this year it sold a boxed set of postcards showing all 30 of its chosen images, year by year.

Smaller Toronto film festivals see the advantage of good poster design. The Toronto indie Film Festival (Sept. 4 to 13), running concurrently with TIFF, is making sure to distinguish itself from the behemoth down the street.

The 2014 Toronto indie poster shows the face of a surprised woman with a stylized right eye and the slogan, “You’ll Never Know What You’ll See Next.”

“We try to create a distinct poster for film buffs to immediately capture both their interest and curiosity in a way that will position us to stand out from the crowd,” says George Shewchuk, the festival’s art director.

“Since the T.O. indie is small and competing with many other film festival venues, we have to ‘yell’ a bit louder than the rest and make sure that we have a recognizable identity and voice. We’ve used our distinctive ‘eye’ from the logo and turned it into a vivid device that signals our niche film offerings.”

Quick, what’s the 2014 poster for TIFF? Right, it doesn’t have one, apart from that program book snapshot of King and John Sts. that looks like it was shot with a cellphone during a rainstorm.

It’s a shame, really. But it’s also very Canadian of TIFF to be reluctant to settle on a single memorable image, preferring instead to blend into the crowd.

Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

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